Wednesday, April 13, 2011

"The Land of Tomorrow"



Shouldn't this have happened by now?

6 comments:

Zaek said...

Well for a few hundred billionaires it already has happened. The downsides are that (A) the rest of us get left in the slums that don't show up in this picture because they're just outside viewfinder range and (B) that swanky modernist restaurant in the background serves mostly hairless goat. The well-heeled cognoscenti call it A Modest Proposal, and membership is very exclusive.

Uncle Sydney 2012 said...

Actually curry goat ain't that bad.

ed pacht said...

To my mind there's one thing more frightening than armageddon, and that is a utopian vision -- any of them -- because none of them can work without extreme repressiveness. The Disney version of Tomorrowland makes my blood run cold.

ed

Uncle Sydney 2012 said...

I guess I'm old fashioned. I still have a soft spot in my head for all the bright hoo-haa of Tomorrow land,...even the arch-criminal Disney's version of it.

This goes back to my many visits to the old 1964 Worlds Fair here in the Emerald City.

It really was fun!

It had an unspoken assumption that all hunger, and oppression was gone.

Everybody on Earth was going to be rich, and having vacations on the moon.

Okay I was 14, but should have known better even then, but I'm a sucker for fantasy.

Maybe that's it. We have to see all those projections as sterile fantasies of our Empire when it was at it's absolute peak.

The real future the one we really got is far more human, and edgy.

Perhaps we're actually lucky for this.

Zaek said...

I totally understand that Sidney. What sane person wouldn't want a world without hunger and oppression? And it really seemed like it was on the cusp of happening, or at least an immiment possibility.

My fantasy future was of a sort of nonstop Woodstock, coast-to-coast if not round the world, with everybody living in teepees and yurts and geodesic domes and Roger Dean hobbit houses with god's eyes in the windows, a loving tribal people running around gleefully naked at will: no hunger, no want, no cruelty, no bigotry, no need for greed, no injustice, a perpetual Morning Star farm wherever you go.

It's still a damn good fantasy in my book, but just a little hard to reconcile with reality.

Zaek said...

Unless you have plenty of pot and Prozac handy, I suppose.